"Kari." Liam's voice. Close. We're on the front walk, and I don't remember the last two blocks.
"I'm fine."
"You're not fine. You haven't spoken since we left."
"I'm processing. People process quietly sometimes."
He opens the front door — his deadbolt, his key — and waits for me to walk in first. The foyer smells like the banana bread I left on the counter, sweet and warm and so aggressively normal that something cracks behind my sternum.
I'm halfway up the stairs before my throat opens.
"She was my family." The words come out thin. Stripped. "My great-aunt. The only person on my mother's side who ever treated me like I was permanent. And someone terrorized her in her own home and nobody — "
My voice breaks. I grip the banister. The wood is solid under my hand — old-growth oak, the kind that holds.
Liam is on the step below me. Not crowding. Not reaching. Just there, the way the banister is there. Structural.
"I want to know who they are," I say.
"I'll find out."
"Margit kept a record of everything. Receipts, correspondence, property records. If someone sent her threatening notes, she kept them. If Halcyon Ridge made her an offer, she kept the letter."
"Where would she store those files?"
"The attic. She had a fireproof filing cabinet up there. She always said the attic was the only room in the house that minded its own business."
Liam looks up the stairs toward the attic access. Then back at me. Gray eyes steady — not warm, not cold, just present. The way a wall is present when you lean against it.
"Tomorrow," he says. "We'll go through the attic together."
"Tonight."
"Tomorrow. You're running on adrenaline and pot roast and whatever you baked at dawn, and the attic isn't going anywhere."
He's right. I hate that he's right. My hands are shaking.
"Fine. Tomorrow."
I climb the rest of the stairs. The bedroom is the same — brass bed, yellow flowers, the ruins of the pillow wall piled at the foot. I don't rebuild it. The pretense feels small next to what Oren told us tonight.
Liam follows a few minutes later. Takes his side. The mattress dips. The ceiling fan clicks.
"Liam."
"Yeah."
"Whatever happened to Margit — whoever did this — they're still here. They're still doing it. To me."
"I know."
"And they're going to find out that I'm not leaving."
Somewhere outside, a car passes. The streetlight throws long shadows across the yellow bedspread.
"No," he says. Quiet. Final. "You're not."
Sleep comes faster than it should, given what I know now. But the deadbolt holds. The man between me and the door is awake. And tomorrow, I'm going into Margit's attic to find out who tried to take this house from her.
